Uncommon lives : an ethnography of schizophrenia as extraordinary experience / Rod Lucas.

Abstract

Concerned with how fifty people diagnosed with schizophrenia invested their world with meaning, utilizing the resources which were available to them in their daily lives. "Extraordinariness" which has its basis in personal experience, is elaborated and multiplied by the social conditions and institutional structures of people's everyday lives. As a consequence of their placement within a field of deinstitutionalized psychiatric services, participants continually traversed the border between their own extraordinary experiences (which highlighted their distinctiveness) and those experiences which were taken for granted by themselves as well as others (and which allowed them to lay an equal claim to ordinariness). In this context, schizophrenia serves as a particularly apt case study in the limits and possibilities of intersubjectivity which is explored as the capacity to render experience meaningful to both self and others.